Industrial marking and coding equipment is a well-known art. Articles (or products or items) carried on a moving line are displaced past a station at which a mark is applied thereto by the marking and coding equipment. Typically the mark is applied by an inkjet process of some type (such as continuous inkjet printing) or by a laser (such as laser printing).
The mark will be referred to hereinafter as a message. As will be well known a message may comprise a string of characters or symbols, typically numbers, letters or a combination of letters and numbers, although other symbols may be used too. Further, a message may comprise both fixed (predetermined) data and variable data. By way of example, a typical message is of the format: “BEST BEFORE 10 MAY 2007”. The “BEST BEFORE” part of the message is fixed but the “10 MAY 2007” part will vary according to the date on which the message is applied to the article.
The above-described industrial marking and coding equipment is often referred to by the term “primary coding printer”. Additionally, such industrial and coding equipment is often referred to by the term “product-identification printer”, although it will be appreciated that the mark/message applied by a product-identification printer to an article need not be a mark/message that actually identifies that article but may, as described above, be any other type of message (such as a message indicating a date by which the article should be used or consumed).
Industrial marking and coding equipment is used in a vast range of different marking applications depending on the user base, environment and market sector. These applications can vary in terms of defining the set of rules or criteria for when to print/mark or general behavioural operation of the coding equipment. This variation in behaviour is typically influenced by physical and functional parameters including the amount of discrete I/O (input/output), the functionality mapped to this I/O, data rates, trigger and synchronisation mechanisms, signal validation/verification and timing etc.
Typically these types of non-standard behavioural operations tend to evolve over time and are managed as “special” hard-wired deployments. As a result, it is often the case that these deployments become out of sync with the mainstream development and migration paths become a limiting factor. In addition, users are often then faced with difficulties in replacing apparatus in the event of a failure or “hot-swapping” of their apparatus.